Sunday, August 17, 2014

NATO Could
Certainly Help Ukraine vs. Russia

Despite Viktor Yanukovych’s best efforts to undermine and disable
the Armed Forces of Ukraine, after nearly eight months of intense combat with
Russian mercenaries, commanders and tanks, missiles and other heavy combat
equipment, Ukrainian soldiers are beginning to record battlefield victories
against their vicious enemy.

Ukraine’s regular Armed Forces, the National Guard and
volunteer paramilitary battalions are liberating town after town in their
campaign to push the Russian invaders back to Russia. The war has reached a
critical point for Russia not only because of the political alienation it is
enduring because the war with Ukraine but also because its key commanders are
leaving the trenches.

Perhaps this is the beginning of the end of the war with
Russia, or as Churchill opined the end of the beginning of what is being called
Russia’s inevitable war with Ukraine, but the fighting will not stop in the
foreseeable future. While Germany last week naively called for a political
solution to the crisis in Ukraine, Berlin and the world must understand that
the crisis in Ukraine is not based in politics. Russia has invaded Ukraine in
order to defeat and re-subjugate it. Moscow could no longer tolerate an
independent Ukraine on its border that ousted its hand-picked governor in the person
of Yanukovych and is fulfilling its goal of joining the European Union and in
time NATO.

In order for Ukraine to realize its mission, the United
States, the EU and NATO must stand up and support Kyiv and President Poroshenko
politically, economically and militarily.

A couple of days ago Ukrainian Foreign Minister Pavlo
Klimkin was quoted as appealing to NATO and the European Union to provide
military support for Ukrainian troops fighting pro-Russian separatists and said
the Western military alliance needed to come up with a new strategy toward Kyiv.

Klimkin told German radio station Deutschlandfunk that the
EU and NATO needed to consider what they could and would do if rules get
broken, adding that this was the case when Moscow annexed Ukraine’s Crimea
peninsula in March and was also true of Russia’s actions in Donetsk and Luhansk
now.

“It’s a really tough question for the European Union and
NATO: What can they do if a war is practically ... being mongered in Europe by
a European country?” he said according to a transcript of the interview. “And
that’s why, if they say “We can't do much there,” it gives rise to the
question: How can you then continue to be seen as a responsible partner?”

Asked if he was appealing to the EU and NATO for military
aid, Klimkin emphatically confirmed: “Yes of course. We need military aid because
if we got such aid, it would be easier for our troops on the ground to act.”

He said Ukraine is facing a tough situation economically and
financially so it needs help now but would later repay this aid. Alongside
direct aid, the country also needed the EU to help it implement reforms,
Klimkin said.

Indeed, will NATO’s new European allies, the former captive
nations, regard the alliance as a serious partner? How will NATO reassure them
that it will protect their interests after it failed to save Ukraine?

Fortunately, NATO’s commanders understand the cost of losing
Ukraine. The alliance’s top commander said in an interview published on Sunday
that if Russia tries to infiltrate troops into a NATO country, even out of
official military uniform as it did before it annexed Ukraine's Crimea, NATO
will respond militarily.

US Air Force Gen. Philip Breedlove, NATO’s Supreme Allied
Commander Europe and a commander who understands the threat Ukrainian is facing,
said although NATO had no plans to intervene in non-NATO member Ukraine, NATO
countries in eastern Europe needed to start preparing for a possible threat
from “little green men” - referring to the Russian soldiers in unmarked
uniforms who stormed Crimea.

“The most important work to prepare a nation for the problem
of ‘little green men,’ or organizing of Russian (speaking) population, it
happens first. It happens now,” Breedlove said in an interview published online
by German newspaper Die Welt.

“How do we now train, organize, equip the police forces and
the military forces of (allied) nations to be able to deal with this?” he asked,
according to a transcript of his remarks in English provided by NATO.

“If we see these actions taking place in a NATO nation and
we are able to attribute them to an aggressor nation, that is Article 5. Now,
it is a military response.”

While Ukraine isn’t a formal NATO member, it should be
regarded as a kindred spirit.

NATO Secretary-General Anders Fogh Rasmussen also seems to
understand the situation. On Friday he accused Russia of an “incursion” into
Ukrainian territory.

“Last night we saw a Russian incursion, a crossing of the
Ukrainian border,” he told reporters in Copenhagen, Denmark, according to Reuters.

However, we are baffled by his cautious use of the word
incursion. Why not assert that Russia has invaded Ukraine and continues to pour
soldiers and heavy equipment into its eastern region.

“It just confirms the fact that we see a continuous flow of
weapons and fighters from Russia into eastern Ukraine and it is a clear
demonstration of continued Russian involvement in the destabilization of
eastern Ukraine,” Rasmussen said.

In fact, why are all allies of Ukraine not raising the alarm
of invasion when none of them are denying that foreign troops are battling in Ukraine?
Why is NATO toying with phrases such as there is a “high probability” that
Russia could launch an invasion of Ukraine?

NATO’s military intelligence agents did not serve its
commanders well in the past six decades, or at least since the collapse of the
USSR because Russia’s war against Ukraine has apparently driven the alliance to
re-analyze its original mission: how to protect its old and new members against
a very real Russian threat. NATO is being caught without a plan or afraid of
carrying out its mission. It will hesitate while someone else’s soldiers die in
a war far away.

Stalling will only bring the war closer to Europe’s capitals
and America’s shores. Will the free world be able to explain why Ukraine was
lost on its watch?